


Rose

by Deannie



Series: Crossover Cross [1]
Category: Supernatural, The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen, Magnificent Seven AU: ATF, telepathic trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 05:57:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8044966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: Ezra and Josiah are undercover in a militia camp. Sam and Dean are hunting. Bad things happen.





	Rose

**Author's Note:**

> For the hc_bingo prompt: telepathic trauma. Part of my Crossover Cross.

“They’re over here—alive!”

“Well thank God for that.”

“Ezra? Ezra?”

“What in God’s name happened here?”

There was nothing to say.

At least, Ezra didn’t seem to be able to _find_ anything to say.

“Med-evac is ten minutes out, Chris. Damn, what a clusterfuck.”

“How’s Josiah doing, Nathan?”

“Not good. He’s lost a lot of blood. Figure Ezra must’ve been with it enough at some point to patch him up, but.... Josiah? It’s Nathan. Come on, old man, stay with me here.”

A hand on Ezra’s arm felt like a firebrand and he yanked himself away from it, ignoring the pain in his head and his neck, looking up in terror and expecting… him. Mad and evil and ready to kill. Bony fingers still scrabbled through his mind.

“Ezra, it’s me. Vin.” It was. The man touching him was Vin. Solid, dependable. Worried.

Ezra let his gaze unfocus, let it drift to the flashing lights of Chris’s SUV, and the shadow of two young men behind it. They were still watching over them, then. Waiting to make sure they were taken care of, just as Sam had promised. “You’ll be okay,” Dean had said.

“Chris, I don’t think all this blood is Josiah’s,” Nathan said. Ezra couldn’t look in his direction. Instead he stared at the flashing lights.

 _You’ll be okay_.

“Pretty sure some of it is Ezra’s,” Vin murmured.

 _No, Dean,_ Ezra thought, as the two shadows faded into the night and he felt the world crash in around him. _I fear nothing will ever be okay again._

********

**_Earlier that night…_ **

“Ethan,” Joe called quietly, walking up behind the man on guard duty. The complex was tucked into the forest, north of Tarryall in the Colorado Rockies. No one was going to find the place, but that didn’t stop Roger Tamin from posting a 24-hour armed guard. “The puppet government could come for our weapons at any time, men,” Roger said. Often. “We need to be ready to show them what it means to be a God-fearing American.”

“Joe,” Ethan returned. He was tired. He and Joe had been cleared by Tamin’s men to move to the camp just two days ago, and they’d both been on alert every moment of that 48 hours. When you were undercover with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, you tended not to sleep.

Tamin was of the opinion that being a God-fearing American included slaughtering other fine citizens to make a political point, and the death toll from his _sorties_ now topped forty-five. He had made contact with a bioweapon manufacturer about a month ago and Joe had been able to confirm just today that at least two tanks of the gas were on the premises here, so the militia man was obviously planning something more ambitious. He claimed angels guided his hand, but Ethan was pretty sure he was just insane. Thanks to some quick teamwork with Homeland Security in securing a couple of ironclad identities, the Bureau had seen an opening to get into his operation, and they’d taken it.

“Anything happening?” Joe asked, leaning against the tree trunk beside Ethan’s as the evening darkened around them. They obviously assumed they were under surveillance at all times. It had taken a _lot_ of groundwork to get Ezra Standish and Josiah Sanchez accepted as fellow radical militia men, bent on preserving the American Way of Life, and they weren’t going to do anything to foul that up.

They only had to keep up the farce long enough to get Tamin and his bioweapons dealer in the complex at the same time. Then they’d set off the GPS locators JD had dubbed their _homing devices_ , at which point the rest of Team Seven would swoop in with half the Southwest Bureau and wipe another homegrown terrorist off the map.

“Sanders! Henderson!” Ethan and Joe turned to see Kyle Rummond striding toward them, toting his rifle. “Tamin wants to see you.” Without another word, he took over Ethan’s guard duty.

The two men exchanged a brief look and headed for the main house.

“No,” Rummond said sharply, stopping them in their tracks. “He’s at the Meeting Place.”

Ethan felt his stomach clench, but he and Joe turned away from the buildings and dutifully headed into the thick trees to the east.

The Meeting Place was a large open area in the middle of the forest. They’d been brought there when they arrived, and Tamin had explained that it was where he “communed with the world of Nature and God,” which did absolutely nothing to change Ethan’s opinion of the man’s sanity.

And, quite honestly, the clearing gave him the creeps. It was circular and perfect and flat. Not one root, not a single fern or weed. While he was sure it was kept this way by Tamin and his men, it still seemed wholly unnatural.

The two men stepped into the empty clearing and looked at each other again.

“Mr. Tamin?” Joe called out tentatively, assuming the leader was nearby. Ethan was glad to see that the ATF profiler was as unsettled as he was. “You wanted to see us?”

Tamin appeared suddenly at the edge of the clearing. “I’ve already seen you,” he said quietly, the sound of it making Ethan shiver in the growing chill of night. “And I’m not sure I like what I see.”

Men were suddenly beside them both, removing their firearms.

“What’s going on?” Ethan asked, going for righteous indignation as a valid first line of defense. “Your people already vetted us. You know we are who we say we are.”

Tamin chuckled. “Who you say you are to _whom_ ?” he asked. He approached, getting into Joe’s face. The broad, powerful agent stood perfectly still, his face blank. Tamin smiled a vicious smile and took the single step needed to reach Ethan. “Because a little birdy told me you aren’t who you said you were to _me_.”

“What little birdy?” Joe asked, his voice calm and steady.

“Me.”

The sweet, cheery, female voice startled both men, and they looked to the opposite side of the clearing, where a girl of perhaps eighteen stood. Her hair was a synthetic but very popular shade of magenta and her clothing was what Ethan had always termed “crunchy”: a hippie-style long flowing dress with boots. She wore leather bangles on each wrist, and a pendant shaped like a rose hung around her neck.

Ethan had never seen her before. And she terrified him.

“Rose is… a friend,” Tamin said with a grin, stepping out of the way so that the girl, who barely reached Ethan’s chin in height, could step forward. “She’s _very_ good at ferreting out people who aren’t supposed to be here.”

Rose pouted, her blue eyes sad, and Ethan would have thought it was absurd if he didn’t feel the overwhelming chill in the air. “You’ve been a very bad boy, Ezra,” she whispered, stopping his heart cold for a moment as she walked up to him and looked into his eyes and used his real name. She moved on to Joe, and this time, reached up to touch his face. “Not as bad as Josiah here, of course,” she said, as Joe’s face contorted in soundless pain. “But then, I think Josiah might be special.”

Ethan tried to hold it together. He even managed it for a few seconds. Until Joe began to scream.

“JOSIAH!” Ezra called sharply, all pretense of cover story blown to hell by the inhuman howl his friend gave out. What the girl was doing to him and how, Ezra had no idea, but _no one_ should make that sound. He threw off one of the men holding him and brought his elbow up to break the nose of the other, spinning to grab the man’s rifle from his hand as he fell. He brought the firearm up and fired at the girl’s head.

And nothing happened.

“The Meeting Place is a place of peace,” Tamin simpered. “God doesn’t allow guns here.”

“What is she doing to him?” Ezra demanded, glaring at Tamin as the guards took hold of him again—three of them this time. Tamin was watching Josiah scream with the shine of insanity in his eyes.

“Opening the doors of his perception,” Tamin said reverently. “God calls on each of us to be who He made us to be. She’s showing him.” He smiled in fond remembrance. “Being reborn can be painful.”

Josiah’s scream seemed to last longer than humanly possible, and Ezra strained against the trio that was fighting to keep him in place. After an eternity, Rose moved her hand away and Josiah fell in a heap, breathing hard and nearly sobbing.

“He’s delicious,” Rose commented, the naked desire on her face making Ezra’s gorge rise. She headed toward _him_ now, and he pulled his attention away from his friend on the ground to watch her come like a mouse does a viper.

“What about you, Ezra?” she asked, running a hand up his arm. What could have seemed seductive was chilling. It felt like a skeleton raking it’s finger bones over him. “Are you as tasty as you seem?”

Her hand reached his face, slid under the skin, and the world changed.

_It melted_

_away_

_showing him a cold gray light_

_a  woman screamed in anger at a husband that lay dead_

_her son—him—abandoned briefly in her grief_

_grief_

_pain_

_—anger and horror and self loathing and kill and_

_blood_

_blood_

_blood_

_blo—_

He tried to breathe and couldn’t, the air thick and hard and sharp as knives as he hit the ground hard. His head felt wrong. Too small. Too many thoughts that didn’t fit.

“You can’t win, you know, boys?” Rose? Rose. Was she speaking to him? “Tamin is an idiot, and I have to say, with a treat like this one, I don’t think I’ll miss him much.”

Treat… _He’s delicious._

_Anger and self-loathing and—_

Ezra fought his eyes open, trying to make sense of the scene in the darkness around him.

Josiah was standing beside her, dwarfing her with his size while she dwarfed him with her presence. They had their backs turned to him, dim visions in the night.

A gunshot jerked Ezra fetal, but it wasn’t directed at him. Guns didn’t work here, did they? He expected to hear a body drop, but Rose laughed instead. “You’ll have to try better than that, Dean,” she said.

Beyond Rose and Josiah, lit by car headlights in the trees behind them, stood two men. Tall, armed…

“Didn’t think that’d work,” the shorter of the two silhouettes seemed to say. The taller whipped his hand up, holding a small harpoon gun. “But guns aren’t everything.”

 _I’ve gone mad,_ Ezra thought, staring at something that could have been an arrow but glowed white hot. It launched from the miniature harpoon and must have hit Rose, causing her to stumble back toward him. Ezra tried to scramble in the dirt, to move away.

Rose turned on him, and her eyes were solid black and glistening. “Don’t go anywhere, honey,” she purred to him. “I need to take care of some business.”

She launched herself across the clearing at the two men, and Ezra again tried to gain his feet. “Josiah!” he called, unnerved by his friend’s stillness. Josiah turned.

His eyes were bright in the darkness, lit from the inside, his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. His anger was so powerful, it split Ezra’s skull.

Like he was inside it...

“Josiah?” Ezra whispered this time, afraid of his friend—of this thing his friend had become.

One of the guards launched himself at Josiah at that moment, and Ezra could only watch, spellbound, as the big ex-priest almost literally tore the man apart, grabbing and tearing and finally twisting the man’s neck with a sickening crack. The satisfaction of the kill flowed through Ezra’s mind and he curled forward and threw up what little he’d eaten that day.

The sound of chanting floated into the air. It didn’t sound the least bit out of place, just urgent and angry and demanding.

“NO!” Tamin’s sudden voice was pure insanity. “No! She was mine! SHE WAS MINE!”

Josiah glared as Tamin came at him, a knife flashing in the headlights across the way and causing a lance of pain in Ezra’s shoulder, though the knife had hit another body entirely. Josiah let out an animal growl and pulled the knife from his shoulder. He threw it to the ground and pounced on the militia man, intent on killing him as viciously as he had the last one.

Ezra grunted and pulled himself up to a crouch, his muscles taut and burning. A rifle, there by the body of another guard. No blood on this one. Josiah must not have killed him, but someone had.

A wind was building out of nowhere. Ezra was somehow sure it didn’t extend beyond this clearing. The clearing… Ezra grabbed the rifle and stumbled for the trees that ringed the cursed circle. As he thought, the wind out here was calm, even if he wasn’t.

“You can’t have her, do you hear me!?” Tamin shrieked, slamming a fist into Josiah’s face so hard, Ezra heard his nose break. Ezra saw his chance and took it, bringing the rifle to bear and shooting for the head as Tamin pushed Josiah’s silent body away from him. The bullet didn’t stop at the edge of the clearing, but continued on it’s proper way, and the militia man fell dead as the wind within the damned space increased and a scorching light grew on the other side of the clearing.

Ezra looked toward it to see Rose open her mouth and arch her back in a way no human body could. With a noise like the splitting of reality, black smoke poured out of her and swooped around the clearing before shooting into the night. Rose fell hard to the ground and lay still, the two silhouettes standing over her body.

Body.

Josiah.

Ezra crawled to his friend, fearful of what he’d find, and breathed a relieved sigh to find him still alive.

“Josiah!” he called, trying to wake him. There was sudden a pressure against his ears—against his mind. Josiah’s eyes snapped open and the big man moved.

He slammed Ezra to the ground, his bloody hands wrapped around Ezra’s neck. Ezra brought the rifle up and slammed it into the side of his skull, and Josiah fell back, stunned for a brief second.

His own head aching with the blow, Ezra scuttled backward, to the edge of the clearing, and turned back to look at him. A wave of pure malice overtook Ezra’s senses as Josiah bellowed in anger and charged.

Ezra ran.

He crashed through the trees, heedless of the branches that tugged at him. The rifle was still in his hands but even though he knew—he _knew_ —Josiah would kill him if he caught him, Ezra just couldn’t shoot him. He was somehow afraid, from the thoughts in his skull that he knew weren’t his own, that if he shot Josiah, it would hurt him just as much. And if he killed him, he’d be dead.

A hand reached out of the darkness and latched onto him, yanking him off his feet and slamming his back into the solid trunk of a tree.

“You’re a clever one,” Rummond said, leering. Except that it wasn’t Rummond at all. Ezra shook with the insanity of it, but _Rose_ grinned at him out of the lackey’s face, her eyes full black and shiny. “I told you not to go anywhere.”

She slammed him hard into the tree and he thought he felt his skull crack as he bounced off and was allowed to fall to the ground.

“Now I was _going_ to keep you to play with,” she said, circling him in Rummond’s body, making it somehow feminine and _hers_. Ezra’s head was swimming, his eyes going in and out of focus. “But I have to take care of those pesky hunters, so I think I’ll just let you and Josiah have a little heart to heart.”

A white light impacted against her back, pushing her forward and into him. She turned around in irritation and left him lying in the dirt. Ezra fought to see something behind her in the night, but his eyesight was failing him.

“Don’t you two ever _quit_?” Rose asked, stepping away from him.

Ezra had a brief second to catch his breath before overwhelming anger and guilt swamped his mind and he scrambled back against the tree, trying to gain his feet before—

—Josiah was on him, sudden and inevitable, crouched above him as his wrapped bloody hands around his neck once more and began to squeeze. Ezra didn’t bother to call out. He didn’t bother to beg. Josiah was gone, and the monster in his place was going to kill him with swift and sure precision.

“Dean! Now!” someone yelled in the dark. Ezra smelled sulfur over the stench of blood coming off of the hands around his neck.

The world went dark as Rose screamed in pain.

*******

“I don’t know. Maybe a homing device?”

“ _Homing device?_ What is this, Star Trek?”

“Well, I don’t know, Sam, but they both have them.”

A hand touched his neck and Ezra brought his own up, grabbing his assailant and twisting his arm.

“Whoa!” a young man cried in surprise. “Take it easy, I’m _helping_.” The hand withdrew and Ezra tried to blink his eyes open. It was still dark, and the young man before him was blurry and strange. And Rose was dead. He didn’t know how he knew, but the pressure in his brain had gone and she’d gone with it.

“Who are…” Ezra’s throat closed up in pain and he cleared it and tried again. “What happened?”

“My name is Dean,” the man said. He gestured to the other shadow in the night. He was crouched over a familiar body. “That’s my brother Sam.” He looked back at Ezra seriously. “You’re going to be okay.”

Ezra shook his head, swallowing stomach acid. “I asked two questions,” he grated, then looked over at Sam and asked a third. “Is Josiah…?” He wasn’t sure what the end of that was. Is Josiah alive? Is he sane? Is he going to finish the job when he wakes up?

“Rose is gone,” Sam said. “He should be okay when he wakes up.” He sat back. “I had to hit him pretty hard to get him off you, but I think he’ll be all right. Is he a friend?”

“Yes.” Ezra pushed himself to sitting at the admission, looking around. They were in the middle of the woods. “How far…” _God_ , his head hurt! He put a hand against the tree and stumbled to his feet. “How far are we from the complex?”

“You’re close,” Dean said, holding him up. “Look, you guys aren’t these guys, are you?” he asked shrewdly.

Ezra didn’t shake his head again. “ATF,” he said shortly. “Have to…”

Dean caught him and he was suddenly on the ground again. “You’re not going far,” Sam warned him. “Neither is your friend.”

With his eyes closed, Ezra could pretend he wasn’t going to throw up. “What was she?” _What did she do to my head?_

“A demon,” Sam replied. He was serious and Ezra believed him. So, clearly, skull fracture.

“GPS,” he whispered, losing the battle to stay conscious. These two men, whoever the hell they were, were going to have to be trusted long enough for Chris and the cavalry to arrive. “Tamin’s men are…”

“Dead,” Dean said coldly. Ezra opened his eyes in shock, but Dean looked like there was too much to explain. “Just…” He handed Ezra the GPS locator. “Is this what you need?”

Ezra nodded and regretted it instantly. “Homing device.”

“See, I _told_ you!” Dean whispered.

Ezra pressed the button, trying and failing to remember how long it would take for the team to come find them. Not too long he hoped, as the world started going sideways again.

“Just rest, all right,” one of them murmured, his voice far away and hard to decipher. “We’ll keep an eye out until help comes.”

Against all instincts, Ezra slept.

********

“Agent Standish?”

Ezra looked up carefully as a nurse walked in the room. If he didn’t move too quickly, the room didn’t swim so badly.

“How are you feeling tonight?” the short black man asked. “Name’s Tony, by the way. I’ll be on tonight instead of Sara.”

 _Pity,_ Ezra thought. _Sara was prettier._ He swallowed and sighed in annoyance. “Headache, blurred vision, vertigo, anxiety—”

“And irritability, got it.” At least Tony had a sense of humor. “But you’re not puking every ten minutes, so that’s good, right?”

“Of course,” Ezra agreed graciously. At least he tried to be gracious. Tony took his vitals and charted them and turned to him with a smile.

“Okay, well, the usual, right? Push the button if you need anything, call me if you need to take a leak—” he chuckled at Ezra’s glare. “Fine, man, fine. Just don’t sue us if you fall on your ass.”

“I’ll be fine,” Ezra told him. “All I want at this point is to sleep.”

In truth, all he wanted was out of here. Well, no, he thought as Tony vacated the room, all he wanted was to know what _really_ happened in the forest, but he didn’t think he’d ever get an answer to that. Two FBI agents, improbably named Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, had posited that one of the tanks of experimental bioweapon gas found in the complex had leaked, causing the deaths of the militia and the unfortunate injuries to the miraculously surviving ATF agents.

A crock, but a tidy one. And since no one really knew how the gas worked, no one questioned too closely why none of the bodies, or Ezra or Josiah themselves, had any trace of poison in their systems.

Ezra wondered if maybe no one wanted to look too hard at what might have made a man kill with his bare hands. Josiah didn’t want to. He was sticking to the idea that he’d been driven mad by the gas and the girl and the violence and the rampage were all hallucinations and drugged frenzy.

And Ezra, who remembered the flavor of self-hate and shame in the thoughts he somehow knew were Josiah’s, let him. He didn’t remember a young woman with jet black eyes or the feel of a skeletal hand in his brain or Tamin’s mad words: _“God calls on each of us to be who He made us to be. She’s showing him.”_ If it helped Josiah to accept the bruises around Ezra’s neck, and the body he put in the morgue, Ezra would forget it all.

At least that’s what he’d tell anyone who asked.

The door opened and Ezra growled. “I assure you, I can go to the bathroom myself.”

“Glad to hear it,” a familiar voice said. “‘Cause I’m not taking you.”

Dean slid into the room, his brother coming in behind and closing the door.

“Agents Cook and Clifford, I presume?” Ezra drawled. He should have been concerned or annoyed or suspicious. “I’m glad to see you,” he said instead.

“Yeah,” Sam said, as if he was ashamed of himself. Like this was his fault. “Look, we figured—well, Dean figured—”

“You need to know what happened,” Dean finished for him. He grinned at the surprise Ezra knew was on his face. “You seemed like the type. And we did kind of leave you hanging, so….” He spread his hands. “Ask away.”

Ezra settled back, trying to formulate a question, but came up blank. “I’m not sure I want to know the answers, actually,” he said, now he had a chance to ask.

“I don’t think you get a choice anymore, Mr. Standish,” Sam replied, again that apology in his voice. As if _he_ didn’t want to know any of this either.

 _Knowledge is currency, darling_ , his mother would tell him. _You bank all you can. Might come in handy one day._

Ezra took a deep breath. “When you said she was a demon, you meant—”

“From Hell,” Dean said, nodding easily. “Yeah.”

Ezra smiled at the absurdity. “I fear this is going to be a very long conversation,” he observed.

And it was.

********  
the end


End file.
